Robert Smith
speaker
1,476 appearances
11 recordings
6 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 8 Jul
Robert Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
the teams have the right to renew the contract for one year and then another year and another year.
There's always another year.
The players didn't know either, but in 1975, a couple of them decided to test it out.
They refused to sign the new one-year contract offered by the team, the kind of contract that everybody had been signing.
They play for one year with no contract,
And at the end of the year, the players and the teams go before an arbitrator to decide, you know, what is the correct reading of the reserve clause.
And the arbitrator finds in favor of the players.
After one year, the players are free to sign with any team that will hire them.
And in fact, these players go sign with other teams and get paid a lot more money.
Surprise, they were being underpaid before.
Around the same time this is happening, the players' union was negotiating their big overarching contract with the owners, with the league.
The contract that covered all of the players.
kind of win to get the owners to capitulate.
The owners agree to get rid of the reserve clause.
Although in the contract, players were only allowed to become free agents after their sixth year in the major leagues.
And similar kinds of things are happening outside of baseball around this time, partly inspired by Kurt Flood.
Players in the NBA and the NFL are challenging restrictive rules.
In 1976, two separate cases made it easier for players in those leagues, for basketball and football players to become free agents, though actually free agency was rather limited in the NFL until the 90s.
Now, we can step back here and ask kind of a fundamental economic question.
What has this shift in sports meant for the way that the pie is split between capital and labor, between the owners and the players?
Showing 361–380 of 1,476 · page 19 of 74
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